skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Only very few of the people who buy smartphones know as much about the technical differences between iOS and Android as we do.

I'm not talking about technical differences. You can look at phone, or the box, and instantly recognize which one is an Apple product.

>Many people just want an iPhone, walk into a store, and end up buying some Android phone because they are told it's the same thing but cheaper.

On what planet do a salespeople try to mislead customers into buying less expensive products?

>That's what trade dress protection should prevent.

That is simply incorrect. Trade dress protection is to prevent customers from mistaking one product (and/or manufacturer) for another. If a customer understands that product X is not product Y, but believes that the two products are functionally equivalent, then that has nothing to do with trade dress protection.
This was a good resource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_flow#Early_exit_from_lo...
This is entirely true, but our phone contact lists are essentially the internet back in the day that everyone maintained their own /etc/hosts. That is, it would be nice is there was some kind of DNS for phone numbers. I don't think this is the solution, but I understand why they're doing it. (Well, aside from the lock-in aspects.)
>>What's your number. I'll call you later today.
> Hold on, I'll give you a missed call.
>>Is this you? Wait. This one?

>>What's your number. I'll call you later today.
>>JACOB

At least in theory
I believe that the Hamming Distance was named after Richard Hamming.
I'm not sure this has anything to do with "competency". When I was in high school, I implemented a kd-tree for a ray tracer using photon mapping. I knew that my n^2 algorithm was slow and that there was probably a better way, so I Googled and figured out how to write code for such a structure.

Since I'm not a programmer (I'm a chemical engineer), I don't instantly know all of the orders of various algorithms (which according to this article makes me "incompetent"). But you can bet that when it comes to implementing something, I'll research and figure out the most efficient algorithm available and use it.

I'm not sure being good at programming has much to do with having a whole bunch of CS knowledge; rather, it's being able to figure out what knowledge you need to know -- when you need to know it.
In my opinion, the whole thing can be explained in three words from Musk's reply: "concierge level service".

I have always been amazed (in a bad way) at the quality of the work done by service departments at luxury and high-end car dealerships. I'm not sure what kind of agreement these independently-owned dealerships have that they're allowed to use the manufacturer's corporate identity to promote their business, but it should be a whole lot stricter.

Conversely, I've never had my laptop receive a shoddy repair at an Apple store - after all, the repair facility is owned and being operated by the same company who built the machine in the first place, so they share common goals and incentives. If Tesla is trying to do for car dealerships and service centers what Apple did for high-tech retail, the privilege of participating would definitely be worth $600/yr to me.

Now, Apple does have a licensing program in place to certify independent repair facilities as "Apple Authorized Service Centers" where warranty work can be performed. I think Tesla would do well to create a similar program, and maybe they plan to! Who knows, it's early days yet.
According to the research discussed in this article, when the intensity of some sensory stimuli increases exponentially, our minds somehow unconsciously perceive the increase as linear. Our perception, in other words, is often logarithmic.

What I find most fascinating about this is that our conscious minds are not very good at thinking about exponential growth. My favorite example is that of the twin brothers who invest with annual gains of 12% each: one twin saves $2,000 from age 19 to 26 (a total of $16,000) and then stops saving; the other twin doesn't start saving until age 27 but then puts away $2,000 every year until age 65 (a total of $78,000). Do the math, and you will see that the savings of the second twin, growing at 12% every year, never catch up with those of the first one.

Our perception might often be logarithmic, and we might understand the math of exponentiation, but our brains are not very good at 'seeing' exponential growth!
They're not the same. VMs can assume invariants (which may not always hold) and compile specialized methods which depend on those assumptions and then fall back to a non-optimized version during the execution of a method. To do something like that (OSR) in C, you'll have to have a very sophisticated runtime.
During this time I still went to school and half of my friends had self-build computers. The other half had computer from very small shops.

And this was also a time when none-Linux Unixes were still still popular, so I would expect some share from them. Linux got a lot of momentum around '98. (Yes, and Macs existed too.) Moreover there was OS/2, BeOS, Irix and whatever... Linux however lost a lot of momentum in the early 2000s when people realized it sucks as a Desktop OS for non-geeks.

90% is well possible I think, but 98%? Never ever.
"Calls may be made to StarStar numbers within the United States from any Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile or AT&T mobile phone." from their official report.
There are some fantastic insights in this talk. I particularly liked:

What appeared at first to me as a defect forced me into automatic programming very early. What appears to be a fault, often, by a change of viewpoint, turns out to be one of the greatest assets you can have.

I'll really try to keep this one in mind the next time I run into a frustrating "just so" problem.
Interesting. When I talked with a Tesla sales rep I was told that maintenance is annual and would cost me $1 per mile from the dealership. She didn't mention a $600/yr contract.

I'm cautiously skeptical of the 'no tire rotation at other shops' claim. They seems not only like a flagrant violation of Magnuson-Moss, it also seems pointlessly customer hostile. Is there confirmation that this is actually the policy?
Getting Started in Event Planning? Things to Consider
> Having noted that, I'm curious about what other languages Hacker News participants speak.

I think there is a relatively large Japanese-English bilingual(ish) contingent on HN, myself included.
Interesting. And I see that it is in fact not interchangeable with the iPod connector. Still, it's pretty hard to imagine someone mistaking a Galaxy Tab for an iPad because of the USB connector.
Huh, I've not heard of that before. That's really interesting.

I'm looking into it now. I need to scale back from current polished design to the root of the offer.

I know that in my day job we manage these tasks with whiteboards, flip charts & paper and it's rubbish! Everyone hates it & it takes too long!

I might ask those that are interested how they currently manage it and how my solution will improve it. (faster, more fun, distributed responsibility) That would really be valuable information!
"Huawei has too much to lose from spying..."

I think this assumption is pretty much incorrect. Corporate liabilities in China are not like corporate liabilities in the western world.
Always ignore advice that begins with the word "always". The use of "never" is never a good sign either.
Why does everyone think this is about Apple? It's possible the comic is referring to Google's monopoly of web searches.

My guess would be he's criticizing "monopoly as dangerous" accusations in general as silly since Microsoft has fallen so far. But that's kind of a poor argument since Microsoft was punished for monopolistic practices, both de jure and de facto.

This really isn't XKCD's best comic and it's not even funny.
Would you mind publishing an example of a piece of hatemail? I'm baffled people would hate you doing that.
Groklaw has quite a lot of detail about the jury foreman and his bankruptcy.

It's really rather unsavoury, drawing all sorts of implications and making a number of unpleasant semi-accusations.

That's disappointing. A stupid patent case is stupid and there is plenty to discuss there, without dragging someone through the mud for something they did in their past.
CAPTCHA asks how you feel about gay people being beaten with sticks
Selling changed my world view much like physics did. Learn to sell.
I don't know, but I assume it's because they are (were?) trying to "kill" "files" as a concept users are expected to know about.
Obviously it is super-important in all sorts of areas of mathematics, but I can't think of any branches of physics that explicitly invoke any interesting topology. (Except probably string theory.)

(And perhaps some areas of solid state do?)
Well, I linked to some data showing it up around 97%-98%. If you think OS/2, BeOS, Irix, or something else was making a significant dent in the late 90s OS market, then... well, frankly I don't know what to say to something so ridiculous.
A score according to this chart is not the only metric by which people are hired, but it is a useful metric which is often difficult to assay.
Well, if it is required for them to survive, they are going to have issues. Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act and some state laws keep auto dealers and manufactures from pulling the "service with us or lose warranty". There are generally exceptions for freely provided services, but this isn't it.

Car modders and local services shops have been down this road before. Honestly expecting every service to occur at the dealers is foolish.
Depends who you ask. Milton Friedman argued that capitalism cannot be seperated from freedom as

"[e]conomic arrangements play a dual role in the promotion of a free society. On the one hand, freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself. In the second place, economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom." [1]

On the other hand, Karl Marx saw capitalism as dividing society into the haves and have nots - the haves being the bourgouise with all the wealth, and the have nots being the proleteriat who had none of the wealth. Marx, obviously, was not a fan.

1. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/ipe/friedman.htm
It doesn't seem far out of line at all.

I just checked, I'm paying just over $300/year for dealer service and inspections on my Ford Transit Connect which sells for about 1/3 of a Tesla S.

I'm not getting roadside assistance (of a revision 1 vehicle), monitoring, or wiper blades. Heck, they usually neglect to reprogram the tire pressure monitor when they rotate the tires.
I kind of wonder if this research would translate to _programming_ languages at all.
Paying for Streetlights, One at a Time
I wonder if this also applies to learning a programming language. Programming is a form of communication.
looks better than soapui :)
There is a reason why you can take a car to a mechanic and end up with it worse off than before you took it in. Car mechanics are incentivized by the dealer to push out jobs quickly. This isn't because they are lazy, its because their ability to make money depends on it. That means real fixes are substituted for patchwork fixes.

I don't drive much, but when I do, I like to take my car to a mechanic that I can watch in person make the repairs.
See this is a temporary solution and shows off all the problems with a global routing database.

If I could dial sarah and it knew that I was referring to my Sarah, that would be great, but another individual identifier of global significance isn't helpful.

What sprint needs are truly separate routing databases for each client. If I dial 101 on my cellphone, I want it to ring my dad; why isn't this possible today? The answer is that it is, but it's too much of a headache for existing equipment within core carrier networks.

In short, bring on the real unified communications, woe to the impostors.
Thanks to google's recent shenenigan's, I've switched to using StartPage. Which, at least for now, is google without big brother tracking. Although I'm sure if it gets popular, google will stop them.
I wouldn't be surprised if they wanted to force people to create native apps instead of allowing web app file uploading via the browser. Forces extra people to buy a developer license, so more money for Apple. And not to forget, more apps in the store...
The "alt" text reads: Facebook, Apple, and Google all got away with their monopolist power grabs because they don't have any 'S's in their names for critics to snarkily replace with '$'s.

So it is partially about Apple.
Some things:

Why the 'that doesnt suck' addition? Are there so many free Bootstrap admin themes out there that suck?

I find it weird that the "53 tickets 27 tasks 15 waiting" looks like every number label is a button.

What do you understand when referring to a "Ruby template" ? Is it .erb's in a package, sections? Does it include some logic? If so, what?

Are you improving on this theme constantly or is it a 'one-off' download?
That's less than 'standard' maintenance on my 28k Acura TSX. It was a real eye opener to see a 1k bill for standard maintenance on a 2 year old car with 12k miles on it.
My favorite part is the tongue in cheek title for Tim Berner-Lee: "Web Developer". That's an understatement (as well as a perfectly accurate one).
You don't need a wizard for every task. There's nothing wrong with taking someone from the left side of the matrix. You just have to consider what they'll be working on and what resources are available to them (ie. mentors, etc.) Hiring decisions are comprised of tradeoffs, just like everything else in engineering.
the discussion here is weird. isn't this obviously about the across-the-board practice of bundling browsers with OSes, which is the rule in mobile OS and is culminating in Chrome OS?
From what I understand, engine exhaust is too hot for any material to withstand without active cooling, which is done as a side-effect of feeding in the fuel. If you just turn it off, then, it's no longer actively cooled, and will rapidly melt from all the other engines around it still going full bore.

This is just a theory.
Washington cannot be trusted to be free of influence from AT&T and Verizon.

Duh, in the Capitalist country the government is influenced by the businesses and in the Communist country the businesses are influenced by the government.
Ive never purchased a new car, so could be thinking about this in the wrong way, but isnt $1/mile way way more expensive than $600/yr? $1/mile seems crazy expensive, so I must be understanding that wrong
Twelve hours of brain-storming, sixteen cans of beer and viraliti get cooler
Radiolab did a good piece about this. http://www.radiolab.org/2009/nov/30/innate-numbers/
What about the brake pads? With regenerative braking, I expect the pads on my Nissan Leaf to last almost as long as the car.

Whether the $600/year is a good price is irrelevant. The matter at hand is "pay us $600/year or we void your warranty". It's shady, for one, and of questionable legality given Magnuson-Moss.
This is an impossible task. The more you go out in public, the more likely you are to be photographed and have that photo placed in a publicly viewable place online. Even untagged photos will be fair game with facial recognition running against public photos.
How to Build a FLYING SAUCER [1956]
just started learning khmer, thanks for posting the article
Secrets of computing. Switch statements, hash tables, profiling. The CIA makes them not teach these.

A thousand line switch statement is not a thousand if-then-elses. It is not a binary-search of 10 if-then-elses. It is a single jump indexing a table of code addresses. A thousand-case switch statement is one instruction.

Take a 1024 sized array of link lists. Add the letters of words bitshifting by one each letter to make a hash function. Now, populate the array and push onto the link-list if collisions. To look-up a key word, you add the letters and look in the array. You will have just one word waiting for you, possibly two.

Each jiffy, record the location of code that was running. Now, make a chart so you see what code is taking the most time. You will see that most of the time is in a certain spot. Nothing else matters!

----

You india niggers are painfully obtuse.

In the Bible, forgive your brother 7 times.

Moses was in the desert 40 years.

Jesus was in the desert 40 days.

Jews were slaves 400 years.

Noah was on the boat 40 days.
Comparing to what Apple is doing right now and what MS is going to do with their WinRT, bundling browser is nothing.
If you're paranoid (eg, programming embedded where it absolutely, positively, should not fail), you always check all arguments and return values. Sometimes libraries shipped from the vender are not perfect, sometimes the vendor's compiler will do something, ahem, unexpected with your return value in some edge case where you've exceeded the stack. I'll agree that wrapping with inlining is a good idea to make code readable, and these days you usually don't have to worry about a lot of hardware limitations (especially in the general case: desktop/Android/iOS/web/etc).
US Air Force’s 1950s supersonic flying saucer declassified
> What about the SpaceX's of the world?

The folks Hamming mentioned did things and discovered things that had never been done before.

SpaceX docking with the ISS? You know that has already been proven out; so not exactly fertile new ground to win a Nobel Prize with.
This is someone's (very arbitrary) opinion in a grid. I hope you don't actually interview people. Figuring out someone's skill level is a soft science; it takes months after a hire to really know where someone is.

Some people I know are great at fixing bugs but have narrow language experience. They're damn valuable. Others integrate well into teams and provide great product feedback. Where's that on here?

Experience isn't measured in years but in knowledge gained. You really start seeing it 4-5 years in, some people move forward, some don't.

There are so many holes in this. I feel like whoever wrote this has a strong desire to reduce people to a number. It's not only terrible, it's a great way to fool yourself.
Ensuring foreign people don't steal it is part of securing a nation.
I agree with this - e.g not being able to bust out a dynamic programming implementation perfectly on a whiteboard doesn't make you a bad programmer - more important is to understand, "hey, looks like when I divide this problem up it has overlapping subproblems - let me research using memoization or dynamic programming". But that still assumes you have the right terms in your head to be able to do the research - and to me that's where some fundamental knowledge of algorithms and data structures comes in handy.
Yes, and it is for that reason that I hope they take their time. SpaceX is very much a pioneer in this space, and how they handle each situation will set the benchmark, for better or worse, for those that come after.

I thought the way they handled the launch abort during the last mission was done very professionally. Likewise, I hope they handle this situation in a manner that underscores the complexity of putting things in space, but also instills confidence that they are up to the task. If they have to walk back any early mis-diagnoses, it could tarnish their image more than a delay in releasing the full details.
Why Code is Not Poetry
Disappointing perhaps, but not uncharacteristic. Which has some irony considering PJ's attempts to keep her identity and the identity of her funders/employers secret, to avoid such personal attacks and claims of financial self-interest.
Looks good. I would have used it three months ago for my current project. One note: when I'm previewing the theme, though it's opened in another tab, it would be beneficial for you to have a message/link that would take me to the download page, rather than returning to the homepage and hunting for it.
Radiolab's Numbers episode covered this fascinating topic back in 2009: http://www.radiolab.org/2009/nov/30/
You can upload things, yet have nearly nothing resembling a filesystem accessible to users. How's that work? Do you just use your iCloud or Dropbox files?
There is a word for those people: Foolish.

Anyone who ties up 20%+ of their annual income in car payments is, frankly, doomed.
Was going to say what your parent said, but now I realize I might be missing key info about regenerative braking.

Do these types of cars use the engine for most braking, even when the pedal is pressed?
You are describing the type of consumer who has a problem with a $600 a year fee -- the ones who can't really afford the product or service in the first place.

This is a wide spread business marketing issue. You have different classes of consumers, and often the loudest complainers are the one who are on low level or free versions. Do they complain loudly because they are the only ones who have time to? May be its just their personality and why they don't have any money? I don't know.

From a business owner standpoint it is pretty easy to see how irrational the original article author's position is. However, it presents a dilemma between choosing to pacify this type of customer vs just ignoring them. Each has its share of downsides.
i think it's slightly different with speech language. you are under a much faster time constraint to understand and reply correctly the first time, whereas in programming depending on your style you might just try a bunch of stuff knowing that the computer won't get annoyed with you
LinkedIn, Filepicker, Crashlytics and other founders speak at MIT
Well, you can, if it's an image or a video.
I have always wondered what my recourse is when a mechanic does shoddy work. Can I sue them in small claims court for the cost of repairing damage that their workmanship caused?

In this case I'm thinking of the time just a few months ago when a hose clamp that was misplaced during a cooling system overhaul caused a head-gasket-damaging overheat... which cost $4800 to fix.
Warranty work (provided free) is one thing, but any service is quite another. If the tire blows out, then I would take it to the nearest goodyear (or whatever comes on a Tesla) dealer. Heck, I wouldn't even think to take a car needing tire balancing to a dealer either.
I don't see how regenerative braking makes a difference? Correct me if I'm wrong but if the pad comes in contact with the brake disc every time you press the brakes, regardless of whether it generates energy or not, I don't see why the compound of the brake pad would wear down any differently to standard brakes.
> You're conflating all entrepeneurs with a very specific subset you're probably more familiar with.

Great! The string of Nobel Prizes from entrepreneurs will be a breath of fresh air. Do you think it will happen first in Physics, Chemistry or Medicine?
I'd say that both Apple and Google both have monopolies over app sales within their ecosystems. And at least one of them seems to be abusing this monopoly power.
"If I dial 101 on my cellphone, I want it to ring my dad; why isn't this possible today?"

Is this more useful than ringing "Dad" from your cellphone, which is already possible?
Curiously, what do you do today?
Like email addresses? I'm glad I am not 2025551234@gmail.com...
> 60-80K

Selection bias. Vast majority of the world and significant % of USA that is rich (enough to have rich people problems). ~15% are below poverty line. Not rich people worry if they'll have enough money to buy food. Not rich people can't afford any car, let alone a luxury one.
Huawei Poses National-Security Threat to the U.S.
Governments go to great lengths to avoid revealing the sources of their information, lest they no longer have such sources.